


Aroace Jughead forever

by Lady_liz



Category: Archie Comics, Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Aromantic Jughead, Asexual Character, Asexual Jughead, Gen, aroace jughead week, aroace jughead!, jughead is my aroace son fight me, self discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 10:58:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10661160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_liz/pseuds/Lady_liz
Summary: Jughead’s friends want to talk to Jughead so they do the reasonable thing… and bribe him with burgers. Lots of aro-aceness ahead.





	Aroace Jughead forever

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all!   
> This is like 95% comics 5% riverdale, 100% about aro ace jughead.

Jughead was walking down the sidewalks of Riverdale with a spring in his step, after all it was his favorite time of the day- burger time. Typically, Jughead was the first to the gangs table, he always carries all of his books for the day to avoid stopping by his locker at the end of it. Today however for some reason the whole gang was already sitting at their table, even Kevin and Reggie who typically had choir and football practice right now. Even for the others, it was rare for more than three of them to accompany him on his daily stop at Pop’s.

Jughead frowned, wondering what was happening. Maybe there had been a recent change in the menu that had everyone excited? But none of them had any food with them at the table?  
Deciding that solving this mystery was slightly more important than immediately consuming burgers (slightly), Jughead headed straight to the table and sat down between Archie and Veronica, as per usual.

“Hey guys. Is something happening that I should know about?”  
Archie smiled kind of sheepishly at him and nodded.  
“To put you in a good mood first we all brought you a burger ”  
Everyone nodded eagerly at the table and Veronica twirled her fingers in the air. Pop materialized behind her with a heaping plate of burgers, Perfect! Already half way through a burger and with a very full mouth Jughead frowned.

“You guys have never brought me burgers all at once before, is everyone okay?”  
Betty leaned across the table with a divisive hand gesture, “Don’t worry Jug, nothings the matter. We all just wanted to talk to you about something, and we thought you might not want to talk about it so we—”  
“—brought you burgers to bribe you” Reggie finished, earning an elbow from Betty.  
“What Reggie meant is that we wanted you to feel comfortable” Betty salvaged.  
“okay then, what do you want to talk about?” Jughead said cautiously while diving into his third burger.  
“First we want you to know that this is a safe and accepting space Jughead. No one is going to judge or think any differently of you regardless what you tell us” Kevin interjected.  
Dilton nodded feverously by his side adding emphasis to the statement.  
“What we wanted to know is why you don’t like being touched in certain situations” Veronica said directly but gently.  
“What situations do you guys mean?”  
Archie pointily looked at their bumping shoulders and squished arms.  
“It just seems like you’re okay with some touch but not others, like slinging an arm on someone shoulder but not other touches like someone holding your hand, and we just want you to be comfortable and to know where your boundaries are” Archie said with an easy smile.  
Jughead nodded while licking his lips from the last burger. Veronica spun her finger in the air and Pops was suddenly their again with another heaping plate.  
“I don’t mind touching like this at all” Jughead waved a vague hand at his and Archie’s arms “is fine. It’s just when its….” Jughead made a weird cross between jazz hands and shrugging.  
“When its what?” Betty kindly asked.  
“I don’t know… I guess when its romantic? Or sexual? Or it isn’t but it could be?”  
Dilton nodded slowly. “If you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you like romantically coded gestures?”  
“Its not so much the gestures, its romance as a whole. The whole thing makes me uncomfortable. I’m much more focused on the good things in life like burgers than girls”

This answer was easily accepted by everyone, after all anyone who has spent more than five minutes with jughead would know that he would chose food over almost anything.  
Reggie had been pretty silent the whole exchange, watching silently and something wasn’t sitting right with him.  
“Jughead do you like girls?”  
The others were slightly taken aback by this, never having though about Jugheads sexuality before, but in hindsight its surprising they haven’t. Jughead had never talked about cute girls with any of them, just gave them half bemused and half exasperated glances when they did.  
Jughead started to fidget slightly, the burgers were definitely helping to keep him in place.  
“I like Betty and Veronica”  
Archie spoke up at that in a rather strained voice “Platonically?”  
Jughead nodded and Archie struggled to hide a sigh of relief, his love life was complicated enough without his best friend being into the same girls he was.  
It was Kevin who spoke up next asking “Okay but do you like girls as a whole… like LIKE them?”  
Jughead chewed thoughtfully on his eighth burger, letting the juice fall on the mess of wrappers and napkins.  
“Well how can you tell?”   
Although this seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to Jughead the group was rather confused by it. None of them had ever had to describe attraction to anyone before, they assumed that everybody they had ever talked to already knew to some extent, that it was part of the human experience.  
Betty being Betty, tried to tackle it based on its symptoms saying, “it’s when you have a crush on someone”. Everyone at the table nodded in agreement.

“Okay” Jughead chewed pensively. He didn’t think he had ever had a crush on anyone, the closest he ever came was probably the run in he had with the burger girl Sabrina a while ago but even that was platonically driven. “How many crushes have you guys had?”  
“Ever?” Reggie asked with some degree of surprise.  
Jughead nodded, tackling his tenth burger.  
It was Dilton who spoke up first, “I would estimate that approximately 60% to 80% of the adult lifetime is spent experiencing attraction. It’s hard to gain conclusive data but If you consider the time people are in relationships and the time they are pinning for a romantic or sexual relationship with a specific person it is at least 40%, for some people it may even be close to 100%”  
“Oh” Jughead said putting his half-eaten burger down. “I kind of thought people where exaggerating when they described crushes as that big of a deal or that long lasting or frequent.

“…So how many crushes have you had?” Betty asked  
“None.”  
“Never?!” Archie explained. “Really?”  
“Maybe you like boys but are repressing it because of internalized homophobia” Kevin said tentatively.  
Jughead just shook his head, “My parents were never bigoted and I don’t think I would really have any reason to repress anything”  
“Maybe your just too young?” Veronica asked  
“Unlikely. Sexual attraction starts at the average age of 10 with a standard deviation of 2-3 years, and romantic attraction although unstudied is widely believed to start significantly beforehand” Dilton nonchalantly rattled off.  
“Ya Jughead nodded, I’m a cool teen, if it was going to happen it would have happened all ready”  
The table fell into silence again and Jughead picked up his burger, eating with much less gusto then before. Jughead had always though that he knew himself very well but now he realized he was wrong. There was this hole in his identity and he didn’t have any words to fill it with.  
“Either way” Betty said slapping him on the back “we still love you as a friend Jughead, don’t worry about it” flashing him a reassuring smile.   
Jughead smiled back weakly, trying to reassure his friends. The conversation turned to other things like the upcoming football game quickly but Jughead’s heart wasn’t in it, making little efforts to follow the conversation. When he finished the second plate of burgers Veronica raised a questioning eyebrow at him and he shrugged her off non cholently. At this point Jughead just really wanted to go home and not even a plate of Pop’s world class burgers could hold him here any longer.

He made his excuse and headed home, thinking quietly the whole way. Again and again his mind came back to the shock that he was not in fact normal for not having crushes on other people and that people actually experienced that…. Regularly? It was hard for him to wrap his mind around it.  
When he finally got home he slipped off into his room and plopped face first onto his bed, decompressing from the day slightly.  
Jughead felt lost, and confused and full of self-doubt, which he hated, but he didn’t know what to do about. He just kept circling to the impossibility that people actually felt romantic and sexual attraction on a YEARLY biases let alone almost every day? It just seemed laughable. Maybe the gang was wrong.  
Rolling over Jughead pulled out his laptop a began searching.

 

Aromantic- someone who does not experiences romantic attraction. Asexual- someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Aroace- someone who experiences neither.

 

Jughead smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey again! I have no actual experience with writing so all forms of feed back are welcomed, also feel free to send me a prompt. 
> 
> My tumblr is https://tasteoface.tumblr.com/ feel free to say hi 
> 
> Viva Aroace Jughead


End file.
